In today's era of information overflow, email users face a side effect, which is the difficulty in managing pile of emails to use them effectively. It is a common task to categorize mails into mail folders so that mail searches can be performed on a subset of mails present in the mail box, for effective mail search results.
Generally, it is important to categorize emails efficiently so that it provides convenient subsets of intended or desired emails while leaving unwanted or unintended emails out of such categorization. However, while many methods have been developed to categorize mails, but none has proven efficient enough to take the actual context from the mail and use it for storing mails in a folder.
Apart from performing mail categorization manually into various folders, one of the known methods for categorizing mails is based on ‘rules’. Here, users define rules to redirect the incoming mails into one of the folders based on a criterion, such as sender, subject, mail contents, etc. However, no matter how refined the rules are, there are always some incoming mails which do not satisfy the rules and users end up needing to define additional rules for them. This process continues and number of rules grows without leading to a definite end. As number of rules relax to include more mails (which were not otherwise reaching “target” folders), the risk of inviting an even greater number of unwanted emails clearly increases.
Chief among the problems with known systems is that only very basic metadata and data/contents of mails are used for mail categorization. However, this misses out on the context of different emails, which can often be even more important in achieving successful categorization. However, context is often missed when something as rudimentary as a subject line is different between emails.
Another problem is that a mail sender does not have a role to play in mail categorization at the receiving end, even though the sender will likely be aware of the context of the email reasonably accurately.
Accordingly, a compelling need has been recognized in connection with providing even more efficient and effective email categorization, to the point of keeping such categorization virtually seamless at the receiver's end.